You can then login to your Hulu Plus account on your Wii or sign up for an account if you haven't already

How to Get Hulu Plus on Wii

in more detail:

NOTE: For this quick solution I use a VPN. Since there are literally hundreds of VPN providers out there, I reviewed most of them personally and decided to go with ExpressVPN for this particular solution. To check this VPN out, click here:

If there's two things I love nowadays way more than I should, it's gaming and watching awesome media on-demand. Nowadays, with technology evolving so darn quickly, I now have the ability to both game and enjoy on-demand media streaming through the same console: my Wii!

The steps for how to watch Hulu Plus on Wii consoles is really straightforward. Here is the quick breakdown:

4 Simple Steps to Get Hulu Plus on Wii:

In your Wii menu, select the "Hulu" icon

Choose the "Login" option located in the bottom left of the screen

If you have a Hulu Plus account, then enter your email address and password then click "Log in"

Wait a moment then you will be logged into your Hulu Plus account on your Wii console

This will be the very simple process to get Hulu Plus on your Wii, however there are occasions when you are denied access to Hulu Plus. Such an occasion happened to me recently when I flew from my New York apartment to visit some friends in Europe.

I was super excited to see that many of them also shared my love of the Wii and on-demand media streaming! I thought to myself, "I can visit Europe and still be able to stay up to date with my Hulu Plus TV shows and get in some sweet Wii gaming, too - awesome!"

But sadly, I quickly realised this would not be the case. For when I tried to access my Hulu Plus account on my friend's Wii in Europe, I was quickly presented with this message:

I was not going to simply give up and be defeated by this blocking, so I decided to dig into some researching and find a solution on how to get Hulu Plus on Wii consoles that would allow me to never have to see this "sorry" message ever again.

And figure out a solution is exactly what I did! So I figured I would share this in a quick guide to help others who might have faced the same problem and can't figure out how to get Hulu Plus on Wii consoles once and for all.

Why is Hulu Plus not Available on my Wii?

The first point of call was to understand the reasons why Hulu Plus would make its service unavailable and blocked to users like myself whom try to access it from outside the US.

After a lot of researching, I determined the reason for this being to do with licensing rights. To be more exact: licensing rights that Hulu has to purchase for each and every piece of media they want to offer on the service. You see, in order for Hulu to offer the media it does; in the regions (countries) it does, comes down to the service purchasing licensing rights for each country with the owners of every piece of media.

This adds up to a lot of monetary investment from Hulu to build up and offer such a large library of media to users in many different countries. Thus, Hulu choose to restrict their service to the US and offer a large library of media, as apposed to a smaller library of media to many countries.

Of course, this means that Hulu must block access to their service to any user that tries to access it from outside the US, like I did in Europe through my Wii.

How is Hulu Plus Blocking Access on my Wii?

Now that we have the reason why determined and understood, an equally important part to wrap your head around is exactly how Hulu applies this block, technically-speaking. Understanding how the service implements this block will fully explain how the solution I walkthrough below works so effectively. So I will go through this quickly for you now.

It did not take me long to figure out that Hulu uses a very common process on their service known as "geo-blocking", which is a process that checks each and every users' IP address when trying to access the service and from each users' individual IP address can determine a location.

So for example if you are trying to access Hulu from Europe on your Wii, like I was, then the geo-blocking process Hulu uses will check your IP address, which is a numerical representation of your current location at that moment, from that gauge that you are not located within the US, and thus instantly deny you access to the service.

From this process, it serves to reason that if you can manage to successfully and securely change your IP address from your actual one to a US-based IP address -- you will then be able to get Hulu Plus on your Wii, right? Exactly!

This took my researching into the world of IP address-changing methods that are available nowadays, of which there are many. After some reviewing, I concluded that the very best approach to this solution is to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN.)

How to Use a VPN to Get Hulu Plus on Your Wii

Step 1: Get a VPN-Enabled Router

Like I said, there are many different VPN service providers available these days. This meant that I went ahead and reviewed a whole bunch of them before deciding to go with ExpressVPN, since it best fit my needs and budget. So I'll use this as the example VPN while walking you through the quick setup steps now.

NOTE: Pay attention to this first step, as this is the all important one to not skip since Wii consoles are not VPN compatible.

Step one is to purchase a VPN-enabled router. Getting one of these takes just a few moments to order online, then you just wait until it's delivered to your home. As a reference, this list of options is a good starting point. You need to do this because, as mentioned earlier, Wii consoles are not VPN enabled. So this is the type of setup you're going to create:

Wii >>> VPN >>> Router

Of course this requires waiting until your VPN-enabled router has arrived to your home, however this definitely is worth the wait since once you have the VPN setup on your router; your entire home internet will be VPN enable.

This means that any device you go online with on your home internet (laptop, smartphone, etc) will be automatically VPN-connected. You will see why this is super handy shortly.

Step 2: Sign up for VPN

The first thing to do is head to the ExpressVPN website, choose the price plan that you want then process payment and confirm your account details. This process takes less than a minute and ExpressVPN make it as simple as possible:

You'll be asked to confirm your account details in an email, which will also give you a direct link to the download area, so go ahead a click on that.

Step 3: Download & Install VPN

Once in the "Download area" of the ExpressVPN website you just need to choose the specific link to download the software for your router setup.

As you'll see in the software download list of devices, there is no quick link for router software, however this makes no difference to you. Just go ahead and download the software onto which ever device you're currently use (for me, for example, it was my Macbook - so I downloaded the OS X software version):

Once the software is dowloaded and installed (the installation steps are super simple and just like any software installation process on your device), you will want to quickly go through the following steps to get the VPN setup on your router <--- which you will have already setup after it arrived. Click here for ExpressVPN's clear and concise setup process for routers.

Step 4: Connect to US-based Server on VPN

In the above-linked setup guide, you will notice that (thankfully) you only need to enter 99% of the details once onto your router.

The only info you will need to enter each time you want to connect to the VPN on a different location, is the data of whichever new location you want to join. This is the all important step, because it is the location you choose to connect to the VPN through that will change your IP address accordingly. So to make sure you get access to Hulu Plus on your Wii console, make sure to choose a US-based server location to join on your VPN here.

Step 5: Setup Hulu Plus Account and Enjoy

Once you have your VPN connection to a US-based server location made, you will now want to open up your Wii and make sure it is connected to your home router.

With that confirmed, you will now be able to access Hulu Plus on your Wii! At this point, if you don't already have one, you can create a Hulu Plus account. If you already have one, then go ahead and login already!

Conclusion

Well done! If you followed each of the above setup steps, you now know how to get Hulu Plus on Wii consoles from any non-US location you happen to be in.

As mentioned, there are a lot of VPN service providers around just now. So of the many I reviewed, I narrowed down the best five that work great on VPN-enabled routers. So go ahead and check these out if you want more options outside ExpressVPN: